According to the findings of recent research, environmental variables such as air pollution are strong predictors of the likelihood of dying from a cardiovascular event such as a stroke or heart attack.
Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University (NYU) completed the research for the study, which was then evaluated by other medical professionals and published in the journal PLOS One.
In order to encompass individuals with elevated incidence of diseases that cannot be spread from person to person, such as esophageal cancer, the study gathered data on the individual as well as environmental risk factors for a total of 50,045 people, the majority of whom were financially challenged villagers in Iran’s Golestan region. The participants’ ages ranged from 40 to 75 years old.
Eighty percent of these people came from 326 rural villages that had a population of between twenty and one hundred and fifty residents each, while the remaining twenty percent were chosen at random from Gonbad City, a big urban area that has a population of approximately one hundred thirty thousand people. The researchers then performed an analysis on the data that was obtained up to December 2018 and developed a model in order to predict the risk of mortality overall as well as the risk of death caused by cardiovascular disease.
The findings of the study
According to the findings of the research, those who are subjected to degrees of outdoor air pollution that are much greater than the norm have a mortality risk that is twenty percent higher, in addition to a mortality risk that is seventeen percent higher due to cardiovascular disease.
The use of wood or kerosene stoves for heating or cooling without ventilation via a chimney raised the risk of mortality by 23 percent and 9 percent, respectively, while also increasing the risk of death from cardiac disease by 36 percent and 19 percent.
Other variables, such as local density of population, night light, regional socioeconomic level, and land use, were shown by the researchers to have no influence on either the risk of overall mortality or cardiovascular-related death.
